America was on the front lines with Ernie Pyle

5:16 AM,
Apr. 18, 2013

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On April 18, 1945, war correspondent Ernie Pyle was shot and killed on an Ie Shima beach when a Japanese machine-gun crew opened up on his jeep. Pyle had gained fame in the 1930s as a national columnist, but it was his tales from the front lines that endeared him to Americans.

As The New York Times said when it reported his death: "His columns, done in foxholes, brought home all the hurt, horror, loneliness and homesickness that every soldier felt. They were the perfect supplement to the soldiers' own letters.

"Though he wrote of his own feelings and his own emotions as he watched men wounded, and saw ...